Stewart’s Paintings is a web project based on a ten year intergenerational queer friendship between the artist Stewart Irwin and me, Charlotte Cooper.
When Stewart died in 2012 I became the custodian of 20 paintings that he produced circa 1986-2006. The pieces were what remained after friends and family took what they wanted from his larger body of work.
I grappled with questions about archiving and distributing Stewart’s paintings, and eventually decided to offer them for free amongst queer people in the UK. I wanted to raise questions about intergenerational queer kinship, inheritance and archiving queer lives.
This site consists of reflections on Stewart, his life and art and an archive of the paintings that were distributed.
